I have to admit that, as a newsman, I was a little disappointed at the turnout for the pro-illegal immigration demonstration at the Civic Center in Santa Ana yesterday.

After all, the bigger the crowd, the bigger the news – and by that standard of news coverage, the demonstration really didn’t rate much more than a brief on Page 18. Unlike last year, when up to 15,000 people marched and protested in downtown Santa Ana, when the event kicked off yesterday afternoon, there were only a few hundred demonstrators on hand. Sometimes, it almost seemed like there were more cops than protesters.

And compared with the earlier demonstrations, most of the protesters who were there seemed sort of listless and disengaged. It was as if over the course of a year much of the steam had leaked out of the radical pro-illegal immigration movement.

Not that I personally think that’s a bad thing. Like a lot of people, I got annoyed last year seeing so many people who weren’t citizens of this country, or even legally registered guests of this country, waving foreign flags and demanding – not asking, demanding! – that this nation change its laws.

True, they had a legal right to protest, the same right as the many U.S. citizens who were protesting along with them. But to me it seemed more than a little impolite, even rude, and certainly not something I would do in somebody else’s country. In fact, if that somebody else’s country was Mexico, I could be thrown in jail for doing it, since that country’s laws specifically prohibit non-Mexican citizens from participating in political protests or demonstrations.

Still, while I’m no fan of pro-illegal immigration demonstrations, it seems to me that if you’re going to hold a demonstration, and if the news media are going to relentlessly hype it for you, you could at least make sure there’s a decent turnout.

But not this year.

“The situation this year is a little more clouded,” Albert Martinez of Chicanos Unidos, one of the organizers, told me. Martinez, 44, a native-born U.S. citizen, explained that last year, illegal immigration supporters were enraged by a congressional proposal to seriously increase criminal penalties on illegal immigrants. But now that that’s off the table, the politicians are talking about much more benign “guest worker” programs and “paths to citizenship” – which doesn’t have the same capacity to put angry bodies in the streets.

“It’s a lot different than last year. People are forgetting,” said Armando Ibarra, 34, who entered the U.S. illegally as a youth, took advantage of the amnesty program in 1986, became a U.S. citizen and is now a grad student at UC Irvine. He blamed the low turnout partly on in-fighting between various pro-illegal immigration groups – but he was glad he came anyway.

“It reminds people that there’s a problem that has to be addressed,” he said.

Well, I probably disagree with Martinez and Ibarra on just about everything, but they’re obviously intelligent, articulate guys, and they knew why they were there. But others in the crowd didn’t seem so sure.

“I don’t know, ask (the organizers),” one guy told me when I asked what he was protesting about. Another guy wearing a Mexican wrestler-style mask and carrying an American flag answered the same question by saying “Somebody asked me to come.” Another 30-year-old guy from Mexico who said he’d been here illegally for 10 years explained to me through fractured English (his) and fractured Spanish (mine) that he wanted “legalization” – although when I asked exactly what that meant, he indicated he’d have to get back to me on that one. And so on.

Of course, it could have been a language problem, or the fact that I’m a white guy who, I’m told, looks suspiciously like a cop. But the protesters I spoke with just didn’t seem as fired up as they were last year.

In fact, even the protest signs seemed tired. In addition to the usual “No One Is Illegal” and “Legalization Now” signs, there were a large number of signs that said, “Gov. Davis, I Want My Drivers License.” It seems the organizers had taken old signs and taped the name “Schwarzenegger” over “Davis,” but the tape had fallen off, leaving many of the protesters making demands on a guy who hasn’t been governor since 2003. That’s how old and tired the signs were.

Now, in fairness, I should note that in order to make deadline, I had to leave early, and I’m told that the protest picked up a little after I left, to about 1,500 people. On the positive side, I should also note that at this year’s protest, American flags far outnumbered foreign ones, which could indicate either a sincere respect for this country or a realization on the organizers’ part that last year’s foreign flag displays caused a backlash.

Nevertheless, and for whatever reasons, this much seems clear:

They can’t throw a pro-illegal immigration demonstration like they used to.

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